Political letters: May and Duncan

MP Elizabeth May wrote today, as she does from time-to-time.
Usually I'm not moved to action by such letters,  recognizing  them for the fundraising efforts they regularly are.
However, this one raised a very important point, pointing to continuing manipulation of the rules of the House of Commons by the Conservative Government, which make it difficult for her to do her job. She identified this rule change as "a motion to require that members, who are either independent or are members of recognized parties with fewer than 12 MPs, submit amendments to committee 48 hours prior to the start of clause by clause consideration of any bill" and demonstrated this was clearly aimed at her interventions in the past.
She further noted that the "Conservative approach, of rejecting any and all amendments while simultaneously abbreviating debate opportunities, is a perversion of the parliamentary process. It is a new and hyper-partisan approach to the legislative process."
And then, as expected, came the request to add my name and email address to a petition...appeals to fill Green Party coffers guaranteed to follow.
That said, I think she's right to be both offended and worried. And she's right that her privilege in the House is ultimately our privilege.
So I wrote a reply:

Ms May:
I am persuaded by your explanation of how the rights of individual MPs are being abridged by the governing Conservatives.
However, I will not put my name on a petition on the letterhead of the Green Party of Canada, as I do not support that party, either federally or provincially.
I will, however, write to John Duncan, my MP, and will add a copy to the Prime Minister and the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.
Sincerely,

And followed that with a letter to my MP:

Dear Minister Duncan,
I have just received a letter from Elizabeth May, MP, detailing the latest roadblock your party has put in her way, making it difficult for her to be an effective Member of Parliament.
She writes, "The Conservative approach, of rejecting any and all amendments while simultaneously abbreviating debate opportunities, is a perversion of the parliamentary process. It is a new and hyper-partisan approach to the legislative process."
Although I am not a supporter of her party, her arguments and examples make sense to me, as I would hope they make sense to you. As you served many years as an Opposition MP, I would hope that you would abhor anything that frustrates the job of such MPs, on the grounds that her Vancouver Island constituents deserve an effective voice just as much as your Vancouver Island constituents.
And I would hope you speak up accordingly.
Yours very sincerely,

Just the latest anti-democratic initiative from a government that claims the following:

Canada's commitment to open government is part of the federal government's efforts to foster greater openness and accountability, to provide Canadians with more opportunities to learn about and participate in government, to drive innovation and economic opportunities for all Canadians and, at the same time, create a more cost effective, efficient and responsive government.

The Ryder

The news has hardly broken, and already I'm fed up with the hand-wringing reporting.
Apparently Ryder Hesjedal was introduced to EPO doping by Danish cyclist and team-mate Michael Rasmussen.  In 2003.
This is news? Maybe in 2003 it would have been, but in 2013?
Does the fact that he may have doped in 2003, when he was an unknown mountain-biker trying to make the Canadian team, automatically mean we must assume he doped for the Giro d'Italia in 2012?
I'd be astonished if Hesjedal had been able to resist in 2003, when the testing was either non-existent or lax, and literally all competitive cyclists were either doping or not winning, and equally astonished if he hadn't been able to resist in 2012, when everybody suspected the top riders.
In fact, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be talking about this at all today if he hadn't doped in 2003, because almost none of us would know his name now!

(Reminds me of that scene in "The Greatest Story Ever Told", where the louche guy pretending to be the Devil is talking to Max von Sydow, who is pretending to be Jesus of Nazareth. The Devil, from his cave high up the mountain points out all the lands below, and tells Jesus all will be his, if only he changes Teams.
Jesus refuses.
But we all know how that turned out.)

Oct 31: I admire the way Hesjedal got out in front of this story.  The flak-catchers for the Unsavoury Mayor et al could benefit from taking note.
Not that the two cases are in any way comperable.

Mike Duffy's corner

The Canadian Senate, that bastion of pork-barrel privilege, is threatening to suspend, without pay, or benefits, or recourse, Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau, all Stephen Harper appointees.
Or, constitutionally-more-correctly, they were recent appointments by the Queen of Canada in Council, which for practical purposes means much the same thing.
They are, to various degrees, contesting this, although all the available evidence so far is that they are guilty of fairly outrageous piggery, even by the slippery standards of the Canadian Senate.
Therefore it is somewhat to my surprise that I find myself in Mike Duffy's corner.
Also Pamela Wallin's. Maybe even Patrick Brazeau's, although that's going to require rather more effort.
That doesn't mean I'm making an argument in favour of keeping the Senate as it is; quite the contrary: I'm a committed abolitionist.
Anyway, a status-quo Senate is not what's on offer, and what the senators are proposing wouldn't improve the Senate. Rather, what they propose to do would render it even more useless than it already is.
Imagine a Senate with a majority of hyper-partisan appointees in the mould of Duffy and Wallin who had the power to silence those inconvenient senators who didn't agree with that majority. Could anything be more redundant? The whole point of senators being appointed is that they cannot be silenced, unless, in the words of the Wikipedia entry, "…he or she fails to attend the Senate for two consecutive parliamentary sessions. Furthermore, senators lose their seats if they are found guilty of treason, an indictable offence, or any "infamous crime"; are declared bankrupt or insolvent; or cease to be qualified." None of the three the Senate proposes to suspend fit those criteria at present, and even if they did, it shouldn't be up to their fellow-senators to discipline them. Once appointed, any senator who continues to clear that low threshold is in until he or she either quits or turns 75.
That's the law, in spite of the fact that Stephen Harper extracted promises of resignation after 8 years from some present members.
So the Senate has no right to render them ineffective in the senate context, no matter how many orders or entreaties they get from the Prime Minister's office. Only the Queen or Her representative in Canada can sign those papers.
What I particularly appreciate about all this is that Stephen Harper came into office on promises to "reform" the Senate, on promises to make it more relevant. So far he has delivered only a partisan atrocity, an embarrassment of flag-waving Conservative cheerleaders even less relevant than the mostly-irrelevant Liberal majorities that preceded them.
So I'm with Mike, Pam, and maybe even Patrick: long may they be burrs under the Conservative saddle, long may they remind Mr Harper of why his nasty brand of politics is often corrosive, and long may they remind us why we'd be better off without not just them, but the entire institution.

A BC education: the reality

Number 2 daughter is going to UBC in the fall, to do her professional year.
These days that's not something I'd normally recommend: it's an expensive program, and the chance of landing a job in a reasonable time at the end is remote.
Except that she's English-French bilingual, and consequently almost guaranteed a public-school job in French Immersion when she has completed.
If she still wants it by then, having experienced the reality.
It's ironic that as she's taking steps to enter the profession, her brother-in-law (we'll call him Eric), married to our eldest, a French Immersion specialist, is taking steps to leave it.
Eric is in his mid-30's with a degree in physics and math, subjects he taught in the International Baccalaureate program at two International Schools. He returned to Canada four years ago, armed with the reputation and paperwork of a highly-effective, motivating, and motivated teacher, who also coached.
Neither he nor our daughter could get an interview in Campbell River that summer.
So they settled in Victoria, on the grounds that there were three school districts in the region, so chances of a job appeared better there than elsewhere on the Island.
Our daughter was interviewed over the summer and was on the Victoria Teacher On Call list when school started. She was in a job by mid-November, replacing a colleague on maternity leave, and hasn't looked back since.
Eric, on the other hand, couldn't get even an interview in Victoria, although everyone acknowledged that the district was seriously short of math and physics specialists. Apparently Victoria already had more TOCs on the list than the union was comfortable with. Fortunately, he eventually fluked into an interview in one of the other districts, and slowly started to gain BC experience and seniority.
He's had at least a part-time job in that district ever since the first year, but has taught his own subjects only occasionally: most semesters he's ended up mostly dealing with students who haven't completed their science and math courses in previous semesters.
And, of course, he coaches.
This semester he finally got to teach physics, replacing a colleague who was trying something else.
Then a couple of weeks ago he was advised once again to apply for a very-part-time job that had been posted for next fall, and they'd try to fill it up over the summer. He knew that meant more course-completion.
But Eric's not a special education teacher. He doesn't feel qualified, and finds the job both frustrating and soul-destroying.
Happily for him, he has options outside the school system, and he's going back to college to explore them.
He's not the only one who is frustrated: his principal expressed dismay that he couldn't place Eric more appropriately, and that he's about to lose a real asset to the school, a teacher who has qualifications and skills the school really needs. But the financial situation is such that the district cannot plan appropriately for next academic year, and seniority governs whom he can place where. His hands are tied.
And that's why I wouldn't recommend a professional year for most people.
Not in BC, anyway.

Signs from an election

When the campaign started in North Island I mentioned to my son that, judging from the signs, it looked to be all Claire Trevena in Campbell River, except for some empty lots.  He said, "That's not surprising. It's embarrassing to be a BCLiberal these days."
That didn't change for about two weeks, but shortly after the "debate" we started to see the occasional Facey lawn sign, and by the end of the campaign there were quite a few. Even so, the Trevena signs, all on private property, still outnumbered them about 5 to 1.
But it was an indication that things were going to be tighter than we could have predicted earlier in the campaign, and in the end the signs didn't even tell an accurate story:
Claire's margin of victory was down somewhat from last time,  50.7% for Claire (BCNDP), versus 42.16% for Facey (BCLiberal), and 7.14% for Bray (Conservative).
Once again, Campbell River went BCLiberal by a small margin.
Tellingly, Claire won big in the communities of the north and on the islands.

So what happened? I believe it's a different story in Campbell River than it is in the rest of the constituency.

Campbell River: I like the theory that what happend here is another manifestation of the "10-second Socred" phenomenon, a blast from the '50s and '60s, when we could never figure out why the between-elections-unpopular WAC Bennett was always re-elected with a majority, and why, once the election had passed, one could never find anyone who had voted for his party.
Apparently, in this election even the pipe dreams of the BCLiberal platform were more a more comfortable fit for many voters than the NDP promise of "Change for the better, one practical step at a time". This in spite of the still-unresolved BC Rail scandal, the HST debacle, the fantasy balanced budget, the culture of cronyism... and we could go on and on.
But there was more to it than that. The BCLiberal campaign slimed NDP leader Adrian Dix so vigorously that, by the end, BCLiberal partisans had no trouble publicly associating him with fraud. Some of that stuck.  In a similar vein, the Facey campaign distorted Claire's record and positions so thoroughly in its advertising that her advocacy for a Campbell River hospital morphed into a claim that the new hospital would be shelved if an NDP government was returned. Her work for the BBC turned into a "she's not from here" meme, and Catalyst closing the Elk Falls pulp mill magically became her fault. I don't think the print advertising to this effect made much of a difference, especially after the front-page story in the Courier-Islander that quoted Claire accusing Nick Facey of lying, but local radio ads on this theme, run just before the election, certainly changed some votes.
I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Campbell River Mirror after the last Facey ad they published:  
As one of his former teachers, I'm pleased that Mr. Facey "thoroughly benefited" from the education he received in Campbell River.
However, it appears that he didn't always pay attention: I'll bet not one of his Social Studies teachers ever said to him, "It's fine to distort the record of a political opponent for political gain." He acquired that idea on his own.
In case he just missed the lesson, he should know that disagreement is is the lifeblood of democracy, but distortion is disrespectful of the system, and inevitably leads to cynicism and less participation.
Surely he isn't in favour of either!
It would have come out just after the election; unfortunately, they chose not to publish it.

Rest of the constituency: The story there is Claire's personal and ongoing relationships with the communities. Voters in the north know that Claire has really worked on their economic issues, like the Port Alice mill. The First Nations know from experience they have Claire's ear. And they really worry about the environment, about oil tankers, and climate change, and salmon, and the reckless attitude the BCLiberals have towards almost any development. 
That, and the voters there know Claire, who has represented them well for 8 years. By contrast, Facey was and is Campbell River, and so are almost all of his supporters.

And that's why Claire beat Facey by just over 2000 votes.

As for the provincial results... I predict it will be a long time before any party in BC will again treat BC voters like the rational adults we all claim we are.  Sad, really.

Elizabeth May, MP

The other day MP Elizabeth May published an article in the Huffington Post Canada. Nothing particularly unusual there: she publishes there regularly.

How many other federal politicians report to Canadians in such a useful way? I regret to say I don't know of any others. So kudos to Elizabeth May.

This time her article was of particular interest to me, as it included her analysis of bills C-38 and C-57, both presently before Parliament, and both having serious potential consequences for those of us living on the BC coast.

She'd actually read them, in toto.

This reading revealed that the Conservative ministers sponsoring those bills have seriously misrepresented them, promising “safeguards” not actually present in writing:

    In March of last year, Budget 2012 promised more pipeline inspections and new tanker regulations. Then ministers claimed the new measures were in the budget omnibus bill C-38. Since C-38 was over 400 pages long, perhaps they did not expect anyone to read it. Maybe they never read it themselves, as Minister Oliver trumpeted then, “Mr. Speaker, the bill will do a great deal to protect the environment... As I mentioned in my remarks, tankers will have to be double-hulled, there will be mandatory pilotage, there will be enhanced navigation, there will be aerial surveillance and additional measures will be taken in particular cases when necessary.
    None of this was in C-38. It is, in fact, what he announced in Vancouver on March 18, 2013. I imagine he wondered why he had such a strong sense of déjà-vu.

So much for C-38. What about C-57?:

    Yesterday Harper’s ministers announced we would find these new measures in Bill C-57, the just tabled for First Reading Safeguarding Canada’s Seas and Skies Act. I have read C-57. This now takes top honours in the on-going competition for most over-hyped legislative title. I have read it and it is essentially a housekeeping act. It deals with the skies, through changes to inspections of aviation accidents and aeronautic indemnities. There is no environmental aspect to the “skies” component. Then there are the amendments related to “seas.” The Marine Act is amended to change the date for the approval of a new director of a port authority. The only oil-spill related components are in the Marine Liability Act. The act is brought into compliance with the 2010 International Convention on Liability and Compensation for Damage in connection with the Carriage and Noxious Substances by Sea. So, nothing about double-hulled tankers...

In other words, the Ministers' words are just smoke, widely covered in the media, but having no legal weight at all.

More kudos to Elizabeth May MP, for doing her job!

I thought the information was important and hadn't seen it reported anywhere else, so sent the URL along to a number of our friends and family, all of whom are, to the best of my knowledge, reliably NDP voters. Most of the time.

And got back several negative comments, in effect pointing out that that Elizabeth May is the leader of the Federal Green Party: the competition; the enemy; potentially the spoiler.

Which misses the point, as far as I'm concerned.

Understand, as a lifelong activist NDPer, I don't support the Green Party of Canada. Any party whose website claims they stand for the following...
   The Green Party respects the need for a balance between competition and co-operation in a healthy economy, and the gifts and flexibility that this dynamic tension offers to society. We believe in social justice while encouraging self-reliance and we respect the principle of reward for effort and risk. Green Party policies will make Parliament more democratic and diverse through democratic renewal. Government must be far more accountable and transparent. The Green Party knows that social justice at home and abroad is both an environmental and an ethical issue.
...is just spouting vacuous nonsense.

And we know now for a fact that, given any chance of electoral success, the Green Party's values and principles are fungible: how else to explain Green candidate Donald Galloway coming out against sewage treatment for Victoria in the recent federal bye-election there? How else to explain Elizabeth May's pandering, unscientific position on smart meters?

But just because Elizabeth May represents a party of -- in addition to a number of committed environmentalists -- a slew of new-agers, wingnuts, and flakes of the tinfoil-hat variety is no reason to disparage what she actually brings to the debate and to the House of Commons.

It's true that she is effectively her own party, and thus is pretty much free of the constraints placed on members of larger and more significant parties.  It's also true that she was named 2012 Parliamentarian of the Year for a reason, and that she does her constituency, province, and country proud most of the time.

Had I lived in Saanich-Gulf Islands during the last election, given the available options I would have voted for her. Having seen her in action, I'd probably do so again in the next.

Occasionally exceptional individuals are more important than party affiliation.

..........

Further link: for those of you still interested in the disconnect between the Conservative propaganda and the problems of shipping dilbit in BC waters, I strongly recommend an article by Dave Tyre printed in Laila Yuile's blog.

This...

...is how I get myself into trouble:
Bought my dad a router/wi-fi, his being second-hand, old, and broken. Plus I couldn't persuade Hubert's tablet to connect wirelessly to it.
So I ordered one on-line from Staples and next day, when it arrived and I had read the box, I started to have second thoughts: his computer is old, a discarded Macbook of Enid's which I've made useful again by replacing the MacOS with Ubuntu Linux; maybe it wouldn't connect?
No problem, however: I'd just put the new one on our system and give him our (not very) old one, which I know works.
So I plugged it in. All the computers promptly hooked up to it.
But there was no security.
So I changed the wi-fi settings to provide security: no computers would log on.
I messed about with this for a while, but nothing worked. I looked on line, but no "fixes" worked, which was not unreasonable as none were trying to fix problems and symptoms that were identical to mine. Some of the suggestions for what one should do to connect a router to our Telus modem were downright scary, so I knew they would inevitably result in long conversations with disapproving Telus techies.  I didn't go there.
I put the old one back on, which made all three Apples happy, but confused the hell out of the Dell. I thought maybe if I upgraded its Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 this problem would just go away.
No such luck; the upgrade just created other problems (why did Python need to reboot? why wouldn't it? why was there no /tmp file space?)
Anyway, that's when I packed it in.
This morning, after following the dog and thinking for an hour, I decided to go back to Plan A. So I replaced our old router with the new one, taking care to unplug both the modem and my computer before doing so. I entered new wi-fi security settings. When I had finished, the Apples were happy.
Then I did a clean install of 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 on the Dell, and now, after some tweaking, it's happy as well.
So is the Ubuntu partition on my iMac.
But the iPod Touch, which we use as our radio most of the time, wouldn't connect, not even when I entered the new security code. As a consequence it now logs, all by itself, into the Telus modem, and works again.
Good thing I'm retired.

This is slight revision of a letter I sent to Bruce, one of the few people I know who actually understands  this sort of thing... and possibly the only other person I know who is interested.

Unexpected consequences

The story goes something like this:

In 1986, when they were in Mr Havelaar's English 11 class at Robron Secondary, Mike and Kevin persuaded him to let them do a Super-8 film about skiing on Mt Washington for their final project. It was a huge success, and next year, when they were in his English 12 class, they repeated with an equally well-received slide-show on the same subject.
According to them, they were rather indifferent students, so they, after graduation (at least Mike; I'm not sure about Kevin) rather than heading for university or college, instead went skiing.
Mike subsequently became Mike Douglas, founding member of the "New Canadian Air Force" and   "godfather of freeskiing" (according to the Wikipedia page) a professional skier presently a documentary filmmaker specializing in ski films.  Kevin Fogolin today is a professional forester and principal in Dynamic Avalanche Consulting. Both live in Whistler; both still live to ski; both have, in effect, turned skiing into careers.

There are corrections to this story, but they are minor:  there must have been two English 11 teachers involved, because according to my records only Kevin was in my English 11 class, while both were in my English 12 class. The film was indeed excellent (I saw it again when they were here recently) and they both graduated with a B in English 12. In other words, they both scored well above average.

I wouldn't have known any of this if I hadn't looked it up. If, in the 25 or so intervening years I ever heard mention of either of these men, I certainly didn't connect their names with those of former students.
Then Mike phoned. He had to jog my memory about the film before I had even a vague recollection.  He was doing a film involving Kevin and a helicopter accident in the Coast Range in winter a couple of years ago that he, the pilot, and one other walked away from. Both he and Kevin remembered the film they had made in English 11 fondly: could they come and interview me about it?

I honestly had little relevant to say. At the time a major project was a requirement of my senior English courses; usually these were research essays. And I cannot have been of much help: I didn't use a Super-8 camera myself, although I'd had a few students do film projects before. But I did remember there had been a film, and did I remember Kevin's name and that he had been a really pleasant kid. So I said "sure".

Whether anything comes of that somewhat awkward interview, it was more than interesting to meet these two after so many years, and it struck me that there has to be something of a reflection implicit in their stories.
No one, not even the boys they were at the time, could have projected their career trajectories when they were in high school. The jobs they do today hadn't even been invented yet when they graduated. And even if there had been such careers, there's nothing to suggest two friends from a town as small as Campbell River would have opted for them or could have made the grade. If there was any sign of the determination and work habits it took to get them to accomplish what they have to date, this wasn't evident in school, although they might perhaps have been extrapolated  from the the time they spent on the mountain.
Hindsight is always perfect, and any narrative only makes sense as edited by the teller in retrospect, so when Mike claims his Grade 11 film-making experience was influential, I believe him but don't take any of the credit. His present career is a logical extension of innumerable decisions, coupled with a considerable native talent.
But it is a good thing he and Kevin got the opportunity in Grade 11, and other worthy school objectives or bureaucratic hurdles didn't get in the way.
The considerable resources pushed at secondary career counselling have always struck me as something of an expensive and unrealistic pipe dream. Stories like those of Mike and Kevin don't do anything to change my opinion.

Takeaway from Victoria

Congratulations to the Victoria NDP campaign team, who got the vote out and their man elected.

But it was close: 37.2% NDP vs 34.3% for the Greens. Denise Savoie won Victoria handily for the NDP in the last three elections, with over 50% of the popular vote last time, so what can the results mean?

One cannot fault the candidate, distinguished lawyer Murray Rankin, whose record speaks for itself. Besides, he missed Denise Savoie's popular vote when she won the first time in 2006, by only 1.2%. His stand on the sewage plant may have cost him some votes, but his position was the only one that was principled. (And he was and is right: Victoria cannot continue to pump essentially untreated sewage into the Straits of Juan de Fuca; this issue should have been dealt with years ago, and the fact that it is more expensive now should be irrelevant. All the rest of us on Vancouver Island dealt with this issue years ago. I don't necessarily expect more from Liberals and Conservatives, but the Greens ought to be embarrassed by their pandering non-position.)

I think we should pay attention to the runner-up, Donald Galloway, another lawyer with impeccable law credentials. With him as the candidate the Greens in Victoria went from 11.6% (highest popular vote percentage to that point) in 2011 to 34.3%, a gain of 22.7%. Not too shabby.

Also, I suspect, entirely unrepeatable.

I have no particular knowledge here, but I think we've seen this picture before: in Saanich, during the last federal election, when Elizabeth May's team beat Conservative cabinet minister Gary Lunn by some 9%.

There is no doubt the "May Team" is a formidable political organization. There is also no doubt that it is financed by and made up of enthusiasts from all the Victoria-area constituencies. Thanks to their work Elizabeth May has become a political power on the south Island. (I would have voted for her myself had I been living in Saanich during the last election. Almost anything is preferable to Gary Lunn, and Elizabeth May is a huge improvement!)

There is also no doubt that Donald Galloway was able to call on the May Team and on Elizabeth May and that they delivered big-time. The reason they didn't win is that they were up against the lower-Island NDP: 7 provincial constituencies, only two of which are not currently represented by NDP MLAs, all of which have strong NDP organizations.

So why won't there be a repeat in the next federal election? That's because the team is Elizabeth's, and the Conservatives will continue to throw everything (including dirty tricks) they can at her to try to take the seat back. She'll need the bodies and the money in her fight; there won't be enough left for other candidates in the area. Prediction: next federal election watch the Green vote in Victoria go back to traditional numbers; if Justin Trudeau becomes Liberal leader, watch the Liberal vote increase dramatically.

On the other hand, I believe there is an immediate implication for next May's provincial election. As I've said before, I don't think Green Party provincial leader Jane Sterk has a chance in Victoria-Beacon Hill against Carole James. Undoubtedly some Greens will gravitate there, but I expect the bulk of May's troops will probably move to support professor Andrew Weaver in OakBay-Gordon Head. With (in my opinion) a relatively weak incumbent and a demonstrably weak NDP candidate, he actually has an excellent chance of being the first Green elected to the BC Legislature, provided he finds an organization to do the work on the ground.

And it wouldn't be a bad thing for an NDP goverment to have a Green in the Leg.

RCMP attitude: an opportunity missed

It's 9:30 AM on a grey Tuesday in November. A 68-year old man and his dog exit the car parked on the side of the Airport Road in Campbell River. The man has glasses, a goatee, and a backpack and is wearing a baseball cap and hiking boots. The dog, a black Standard Poodle inexplicably named "Pumpkin" is wearing a bright blue collar. They're setting out on their daily walk.

As they approach the gate on the Erickson Main, the logging road behind the airport that leads to the Duncan Bay Main, the man notices a black truck with a black canopy backed right up to the "NO PARKING" sign. 
Although he knows most of the vehicles of the regular dog-walkers, he doesn't recognize this one, and wonders if maybe they'll meet a new dog. And it reminds him of an incident he witnessed last summer, when he encountered a furious person with a gate key who wanted to exit and couldn't because of another truck.
The man lets the dog off the leash as soon as they're on the logging road. The dog, nose down, heads up the road and the man follows.
When the dog turns the first corner, the man suddenly hears barking. Then, rounding the corner, he sees a furious Shepherd cross straining at the end of a short leash. This dog is accompanied by two bullet-shaped men, one of whom is holding the leash and saying something. Both men have yellow stripes down their pant legs.
The man says, "Here, Pumpkin". But Pumpkin is in dog-meeting mode, so that's the only thing in his small mind.
The policeman holding the Shepherd says, "Don't come here" and something that is drowned out by the Shepherd's fury.
So the man yells, "Pumpkin, Come!" Then starts to explain, "Sorry, he's not my dog, and sometimes he just doesn't..." But Pumpkin, now less than 50 feet from the Shepherd, has already figured out that this is not a dog he wants to meet, so he just stands. The man grabs Pumpkin's collar and puts him back on his leash.
The Shephered is still going nuts at the end of his leash as the man and his Poodle pass by on the other side of the road.
The Constable holding the dog exclaims, "You should be more careful when you see a police vehicle."
To which the man replies, "I didn't see a police vehicle."
"We're parked right in front of the gate!"
"And where does it say 'police' on that vehicle?"
As the constables and their dog round the corner, the man hears, "I suppose you wouldn't recognize a school bus either!"

Good one, Constable. And great job on the PR.